Enterprise questions

[Kandekilla]

My company is looking at upgrading from WinMo Intrepids to possibly Android phones. We are with Sprint so only those phones are being looked at. Couple of questions from an enterprise mind. Android 2.2 updated exchange policy support so some of our concerns are being met. My biggest questions are relating to Sprint ID and the Android Market.

One does anyone know if you can totally locked down Sprint ID? As in not allow other ones from being downloaded and installed. Basically to give us a way to lock the phone down with what apps we want.

Next big thing is can the Android Market be locked down/Blocked/Removed?

Remember these are going to be company phones mainly being used for exchange email, not personal phones to play around with eating up data. Generally just looking at ways to keep the phones secure from all the nasties out there. We are looking at the Optimus S which is why I bring up Sprint ID.

For my side of it, I would generally be against this. I own an Evo and love tinkering plus I will be the one developing in house apps for us to use.

The only way to convince my IT director plus all of our leadership team is that we can make these phones as secure as possible from outside sources to keep our data safe.

If anyone knows of some good sources to find out more about enterprise lock downs of android phones it would be much appreciated. Trust me, it pains me to want to do this to phones. Between my Evo and Pre i love customization and hackery.

Also we can use personal phones period. Some of our vendors require total lock down for audit purposes.

 

[A.Nonymous]

I don't believe you can unless you're willing to root the phone. Even then if people have physical access to the device, they can change it. I don't think you can lock down a WinMo phone that way either to block all 3rd party apps. I'm not entirely sold on Android for Enterprise though. I think BB lets you lock down the phone completely. I have no idea about Windows Phone 7.

 

[Kandekilla]

With WinMO we can go through and get rid of all marketplace apps. Right now we are able to remove easily:
[FONT=&quot]Internet Sharing[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Marketplace[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]MSN Money[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]NASCAR[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]NFL Mobile[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Remote Desktop[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Software Store[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Sprint TV[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Sprint Titan Manager[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Sprint Navigation[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot]Sprint Music Store[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot][/FONT]

While physical access does leave things open for the person doing stuff, we are able to limit pretty heavily their ease of installing things. Every phone we activate or upgrade has these deleted right away. Yes they can reset the phone, but they would still have to bring the phone in to be re-setup for our exchange policies. So we can see everything anyway. A lot of this is both from a data security stand point as well as a data usage stand point. Enterprise plans aren't that same as consumer so we try and limit data usage as much as possible.